It is not necessary for a government to be thoroughgoingly despotic for us to live in a totalitarian condition in which we are afraid to say some things and—what is even worse—are required to say others. In such a condition, we are obliged to deny what we believe and assent to what we do not ...

There was a very curious letter to the editor in the latest edition of the English monthly magazine The Critic. It was from a correspondent who defended the type of architecture known as brutalist, that is to say of buildings constructed of and faced with large blocks of raw concrete. The letter ...

For reasons best known to myself, last week I read a short book about Richard II, the English king who came to the throne at age 10 and was deposed 22 years later, in 1399, and murdered the following year. It seems that Shakespeare got him more or less right, at least if the chronicles of the time ...

An employment tribunal in England has just ruled that ethical veganism—the refusal to consume animal products in any form—is equivalent to a religion or philosophical belief that is entitled to protection under antidiscrimination laws. A man called Jordi Casamitjana took his employer, a ...

O Hamlet, what a falling off was there! The contrast between Prince Harry and his grandmother is not only that between one generation and another, but between one conception of life, one culture, and another. I know which I prefer, but others may think, indeed do think, different. On the one side ...

These days one doesn’t know—if one ever did—what to believe. We are told, for example, that Hungary and Poland are sliding into authoritarianism, but is it true? Most of us speak neither Hungarian nor Polish, and those people we know who do so are usually parti pris. It all depends on whether ...

When nothing is too absurd to be false, it is scarcely any wonder that fake news flourishes. Therefore, I hesitated to believe that a large budget airline, easyJet, had instructed its staff no longer to use “Ladies and gentlemen” to welcome passengers aboard, but “Hello, everyone,” on the ...

Nature, which we are taught to revere and which in Europe is relatively benign, can nevertheless sometimes be a bit of a nuisance. For example, when I returned to my house in the country after an absence of a few months, I found that the flies had taken up residence between one shutter and a ...

Arriving in Paris on one of the few trains still running in the middle of the strike by public sector workers who, as good socialists, were trying to preserve their privileged pension arrangements for all eternity irrespective of the finances of the country, we participated in a brief but Darwinian ...

There are few sounds more frightening than that of the English young enjoying themselves. The English, it was once said, take their pleasures sadly; but now they take them loudly, which is far, far worse. Their pleasures are brutish, and the sounds the men emit while experiencing them are ...